mrbigjas

i guess i did! i thought i was out, to tell the truth, but i found the bottle tonight in the back of the liquor cabinet with just one tiny little shot in it. which, you know, at 140 proof is about all that's needed. but it's still a sad day.

that's what i thought, i guess, lisa. i mean, that was i guess my rationale that i never thought too much about. like you know how you don't sautee with really good extra virgin olive oil, because what's the point -- a lot of what makes it good is lost when you heat it.

i topped off my lamb with sweet peppers by finishing off the very last of my centerba. (that's an old pic) so my question is: where can i get more in the US?

gabriel -- you have a point there. i never really thought about it much, to tell you the truth. i just always bought store brand butter for clarifying, figuring that since i'm already cooking it and straining it and all, whatever more complicated, volatile flavor components would probably be lost in the process. maybe that's not the case. that's something to think about.

oh good point, it can get real crowded in there, and the noise from the tile floor doesn't help. but the wings rock. and they come in big piles on plastic cafeteria trays. mmmm i could go for some of them right now.

fergie's and mcgillin's are just a few blocks from the troc as well. fergie's was always our goto before a troc show. mcgillins had good wings last time i was there.

hm, i hadn't really thought of it. i'm not entirely sure i filter it quite well enough. on the other hand, isn't butter is pretty stable at room temp for a while? my family always left it out so it would be spreadable. of course there were six people in the house, so it went pretty fast. i did have that one experience where i left butter out and came back and it smelled like blue cheese. that was kinda weird. edited: milk solids i generally toss. or spread on a tortilla. or a piece of bread.

interesting info! thanks for the pointer about a culture possibly being listed as 'natural flavors', helenjp. maybe it's a false alarm after all. I've sent an email to wegmans' customer service to find out. i was buying the unsalted kind of butter, so it wasn't salt. or shouldn't have been. besides, salt is always listed as an ingredient, not as natural flavors, so i don't think it would be that. (i have made clarified butter out of salted butter before, and let me tell you the foam and leftover bits are like popcorn without the nuisance of actual popcorn. aaaaw yeah). that parma butter is awesome. sometimes i want to eat slabs of it on bread like cheese, but for some reason i have a mental block against doing that. for some reason. i wonder what that could be. edited to add: really it's not that big a deal to do -- i just buy a pound at a time, clarify it, and then store in a jar in the fridge. it takes me months to use up, so like stockmaking, it's one of those things i don't mind taking the time to do.

so i'm at wegmans last week, buying a couple pounds of butter to clarify. i've always figured, sure, i know all about nice cultured butters from france, and ireland, and denmark, and parma and whatnot. but this is just for clarified butter, just buy the cheap stuff. so i've got it in the pan and i look at the wrapper as i throw it away: INGREDIENTS: sweet cream, natural flavors. uh, natural flavors? in butter? i mean, why? butter is just cream -- why add to it? or is there something else i'm missing here? have we gotten so used to microwave popcorn and whatnot, that they have to add butter flavor to actual butter? finally, since i usually just buy plugra at trader joes: is this pretty much commonplace, and i just haven't noticed it?

welcome shawn! post more!

kevin -- let me add my congratulations to everyone! last night i made the lamb with sweet peppers dish from ada boni's book. except i made it as a much longer stew since i was using bone-in chunks of lamb shoulder. and we didn't eat it. i had bought several pounds of lamb shoulder that i wasn't sure what i wanted to do with, so i split it up and made that with with half of it. with the other half, i made hui stew with chickpeas and star anise from hot sour salty sweet . now that was a real mix of cooking smells all at once. but we're not going to eat either of them till tomorrow at the earliest. i have a chicken i have to roast tonight. and the reason i'm telling you all this is so that kevin can get a glimpse of how i have to cook now and he may in the future: wait till sunday evening when the kid goes to bed, and then spend nearly three hours cooking lamb several ways to have throughout the week... it's still good fun, but the satisfaction of making and then eating something immediately is lost. On the other hand, considering how stews and ragouts and other braised/stewed things get better for a couple of days, being forced to make something ahead of time could be an advantage in disguise...

maybe we should change the thread subtitle back to IS THIS A PRACTICAL JOKE? hahaha

little pete's will give you takeout. around graduate hospital there's a crappy chinese place at 17th & south that's open till 11 or 11:30, and that's about it. gourmet to go (the vegetarian place) might be open kinda late, i'm not sure. randazzo's and lazaro's are open till 11 or so. there are not a ton of latenight takeout options in general in the area. i think in this situation you should stop at tai lake and get yourself a whole fried fish with black bean sauce.

maybe we can blame jacques pepin for that one. in complete techniques that's exactly what he does. i've always wondered about that.

yeah it has liver in it usually. but it's like a 1:1:1:1 ratio of pork, veal, fat and liver, so it's pretty mildly livery. if you google pate de campagne recipe you can get a sense of what's going on in there.

it's on south, on the north side of the street, just above 16th. it's like the first or second building past the construction fences on the corner.

i've been back to pumpkin market several times since i posted about it above. and i just want to mention that dude has a way with preserved/processed/cured meats. tonight the piece of meat i took out of the freezer this morning didn't thaw, so i stopped by to see what was in the case. the lamb lasagna didn't really catch my fancy, so i picked up some pork rillettes, some coppa di testa, some lentil salad, and some roasted asparagus. they very kindly hooked us up with some caperberries and pickled onions and gherkins and whatnot for the meats. and they were out of bread to sell, so they gave me half a loaf of sourdough that they had already cut into. and on the asparagus, the highlight of the meal: a morel and beech mushroom vinaigrette. i've mentioned the country pate before, and their oxtail terrine--all really fantastic. all for about $17. really i can't recommend this place enough. i need him to make some of his spicy chicken liver pate again though, that i had the first time i went to the restaurant. i think i'll ask next time i'm in there. edited to say: p.s. in their little fridge of produce/cheese/sodas/whatever, they were selling the first ramps i've seen this year. i'd heard they were in but hadn't been back to the terminal since then. kinda pricey, but then again they always are. it's just funny to see something like that in a little neighborhood store.

depends on the vegetable. i've found that a lot of grocery stores shower their vegetables with water, so if you leave them in the bag they start to rot. this is especially true of herbs. if so, take them out, wrap them in a paper towel to absorb the excess moisture and put them in a dry bag. generally i leave them in the bag but the key thing seems to be taking off the twist ties that hold them together. they rot under that. i don't leave a lot of things loose. root vegetables. citrus.

awesome -- i wish i'd known about that before! i don't read the NJ forum much because they mainly talk about places up in north jersey, which is an area that frightens and confuses me. i've been hitting up uddupi dosa house usually, but i always seem to end up there on chaat night, so i don't get the whole experience...

Mr Big, I have had Robouchon's langostine dish (twice - once in Paris and once in Las Vegas) and I don't think phyllo will do it justice. ← hmm... good point. of course, shrimp might not do it justice either, as the article recommended. yeah, so, shrimp in phyllo. and instead of the nice salad on the side, i'm going to serve some twigs and grass... and instead of the fancy china i'm going to serve it on an old vinyl placemat. and then afterwards i'm going to the website and give that recipe ZERO STARS because it's so terrible.

we have a drawer full of dishtowels and every night bust out a new one or two, and use them for everything. then every week or so we do a load of laundry that's just dishtowels, in hot water with bleach, colored along with white, because they're just dishtowels, who cares if they fade? mostly they're those towels they sell at williams-sonoma (like this), which people have bought us as gifts over the last several years. funny how people do that when they know you like to cook. because really, $15 for four dishtowels is silly, but at the same time $15 is a nice price point for a throw-in when someone is getting you a gift but doesn't think they've spent enough on you.

yeah but that would be really weird in a taco with potatoes and the cilantro/onion mix. they just taste so different i can't imagine spanish chorizo in mexican food. i mean the fact that it's cured while mexican isn't would be weird enough. although there is that recipe in the jose andres tapas book that's chorizo and potatoes stewed together. but still it would be weird in a taco. back on topic: further thinking back on my meal at xochitl, the general memory i still have of it was that everything was a little timid. the big bold flavors i associate with mexican food weren't as big and bold as i wanted them to be. (edited to say, apparently unlike you guys' experience...) everything tasted good and was cooked correctly, but it just didn't taste as much as i wanted it to. i like a big pile of barbacoa, though, so maybe a return visit is in order. or maybe i'll hit that up in south philly on sunday... mmmm weird spaghetti....

i had a good cocktail when i went there in february. something with that stuff pama. i thought the shank was good not great. seemed like it needed something. some kind of ... more of a meatier taste. the sopes and gorditas tasted like the usual suspects to me, but then again i like fried corn things. mexican chorizo is different from spanish -- usually hotter, flavored with chili and garlic, not cured. you could try picking some up from one of the mexican markets down in the italian market area, and cooking it to get a sense of how it 'should' taste. it might bring a taco meat association to your mind no matter how it's cooked. i mean, that might not have been the fault of the place. overall though we thought the food was pretty good there. because of the scene and the cocktails, of course, we sort of had a 'we could get this way cheaper somewhere else' moment, but it wasn't because of the food. i would say a return visit is in order to see, but i go out too rarely and there are too many places i'm missing out on already to go back so soon.

who wants to put a ten spot on what philadining's new favorite mussels are? i got snackbar.

have you ever checked out cafe de laos on 11th street? we always order from the laotian side of the menu, but the thai things we've ordered have been good too. no one i'm with ever wants the ant egg soup though. disclaimer: by 'good' i mean 'i liked it,' not 'just like in bangkok.' i don't know from real thai food, having never been to thailand. i just know what i like, and how it compares to regular old american thai food you get everywhere around town. basically if someone makes something other than the usual stuff, i dig it. well, if it's good, that is.